Aug 31 2008
Universal(?) Disk Format…
Funny thing, but when I hear that something is ‘universal’ I am starting having doubts. Not about universality. No. About usefulness. I wonder if something that is ‘universal’ is capable of doing one thing the proper way. In Poland we have a saying: ‘If something is quite-good in many areas, it is not good enough in any of them’.
Few days ago, I received an .iso image that was created as an udf image. I am using the free version of Alcohol 52%, so I mounted it immediately… and saw only information, that ‘this disk was created as an udf image, and your system does not support this format’ (or something like this). I tried to mount it on my alternative os – Ubuntu 8.04 (also using udftools) – but it didn’t work too. I Googled for a while, and found a solution – the free version of Elby’s Virtual Clone Drive. I mounted the image to a new virtual drive… and it worked! It seems that Elby’s virtual drive is the only free software that is capable of mounting disks in udf format (or udf 2.x – I didn’t checked the version). I didn’t get rid of Alcohol 52% (mainly because of it shell integration) but Vritual Clone Drive is just a good addition when needed.
